Daniele Ortu

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of North Texas

In radical behaviorism, the difference between overt and covert responses does not depend on properties of the behavior but on the sensitivity of the measurement tools employed by the experimenter. Current neuroscientific research utilizes technologies that allow measurement of variables that are undetected by the tools typically used by behavior a...

We describe here two approaches introduced by Abrahamsen (1987) that can be used by behavior analysts to interpret neuroscientific data. The first is a “boundary-bridging” approach aimed at understanding the interdisciplinary interactions between the behavioral and the neural levels of analysis while keeping the two domains independent. When presen...

Historically, the fields of operant selection and recognition memory have not interacted substantially with one another. However, both deal with how behavioral repertoires change over time as a function of environmental stimulation. In this article, we propose neuro-operant interpretations of behavioral phenomena occurring in recognition memory pro...

In the current study we assessed the possibility of developing intraexperimentally behavioral priming and Event Related Potentials (ERP) effects that are often studied with stimuli to which participants typically have a very extensive pre-experimental history, like words. To do so we used abstract geometrical figures in a baseline Lexical Decision...

Documented cases of innocent persons in the United States having confessed to crimes that they did not commit have become commonplace since the emergence of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing as a means for confirming a person’s innocence or guilt. The risk of imprisoning any more innocent individuals on the basis of false confessions warrants a...

This preliminary study sought to examine stimulus control influences on navigation behaviors of adult human participants in a virtual simulation of a maze. The maze design was adapted from Morris’s (Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 11, 47–60, 1984) “water maze” typically used with rats. In our study, in a “simple” condition, participants navigate t...

The discipline of film studies often engages in analyses of the functions of filmmakers’ decisions in terms of their effects on viewers. Behavior analysis uses a similar, functional-analytic approach toward understanding the relationship between individuals’ behavior and the environmental effects that maintain their behavior. Given converging simil...

While response systems are often mentioned in the behavioral and physiological literature, an explicit discussion of what response systems are is lacking. Here we argue that response systems can be understood as an interaction between anatomically constrained behavioral topographies occasioned by currently present stimuli and a history of reinforce...

One challenge faced by students of behavior analysis is finding a graduate training program that provides opportunities to study how cultural phenomena develop within a selectionist perspective. Research labs in culturo-behavior science provide opportunities for students to consume and conduct research that contributes to the understanding of how c...

This is the preliminary analysis data on EEG AEP measures obtained on Tinnitus participants getting positive reinforcement based therapeutic intervention with the neurophysiological model of lateral inhibition of Tinnitus frequency

The seemingly puzzling datum that behavior decreases after punishing stimulation while individuals are still able to remember traumatic episodes is discussed in relation to dopaminergic and noradrenergic neuromodulation. The described mechanisms may contribute to an understanding of how occurrences of learning reconsolidation yield different outcom...

The N400 is one of the most widely studied ERP components, and has come to be viewed as an index of the semantic processing that relates distinct stimuli. In this study, we examine whether the N400 is sensitive to the associative relationship between distinct stimuli, and not the degree to which the stimuli share semantic features. We used previous...

In these series of experiments we used an iterated prisoners’ dilemma game (IPDG) to examine the effect of metacontingencies on aggregate products of the interrelated behavior of four players. Results of the first experiment showed that cultural level consequences (“market feedback” in the form of points delivered to all players) contingent o...

Successful adaption requires learning to respond appropriately to cues associated with response-reinforcer contingencies. In this investigation, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize changes in frontal and limbic activation associated with learning under a positive reinforcement contingency. Imaging analyses identified linea...